Taxpayers As Well As Farmers Must Share Cost

To rescue the river of grass

If Floridians are truly committed to restoring and preserving the Everglades, it is time to put aside emotional rhetoric and wrestle instead with a rational, fair way to get the job done.

If we do not, then the historic settlement agreement announced recently by U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt could be lost and all parties will be forced to return to endless litigation, instead of moving forward on restoration of the Everglades.

It is difficult to put aside years of distrust. But all of us - farmers, environmentalists, city dwellers, state officials and federal regulators - must make the commitment to put the future of the Everglades and our economic base ahead of our distrust for one another.

Most of us in the farming community are ready. We would rather develop solutions, put an end to the court battles and get on with our lives than continue the endless rounds of heated debate. Sadly, some environmental advocates who have built careers fighting this battle are having a difficult time accepting that they have won.

The Babbitt agreement is based on a plan that will go far beyond cleaning up agricultural runoff. It will also begin the process of restoring water flow to the Everglades and providing future water supply to both the Everglades and urban areas.

The farmers are doing their fair share by paying more than $300 million to remove phosphorus from farm runoff. That's filtering the runoff more than twice as clean as rainfall.

Urban residents must accept their fair share, as well, to restore natural sheet flow to the Everglades and to increase water supply. Every taxpayer in Florida, and in the United States, will help pay for these restoration costs, just as the nation's taxpayers many years ago picked up the tab to ditch and drain the Everglades from the Kissimmee River south, to make South Florida habitable. Farmers alone cannot shoulder the burden of reversing 80 years of drain-and-fill state policy.

This compromise was reached in the spirit of taking a significant step toward restoring an entire ecosystem, one that begins with Central Florida's Reedy Creek and the Kissimmee River.

Biting off a smaller piece would be easier. Cleaning up only agricultural runoff would be easier. But the hard truth is that considering the system as a whole results in the best solution for the Everglades.

Some 5 million people now live in the historic Florida Everglades; only a small percentage of them are farmers. Even if all of the farms in the area south of Lake Okeechobee shut down tomorrow, most of those 5 million people would still be there. And even if farming shut down tomorrow, taxpayers would still face a massive bill to rearrange the canal system that keeps their homes, businesses and streets from flooding in the summer and provides them with water for baths and lawns in the winter.

In other words, eliminating farming would not restore the Everglades. This is one of the hard truths that must be faced.

Another hard truth is that a few people would rather point a finger at the farmers than tell urban residents the truth about water pollution and consumption levels in their hometowns. The water that runs off every suburban lawn is infinitely ''dirtier'' than runoff from farms.

Those few extremists who refer to farm canals as ''sewers'' are misleading urban dwellers for political purposes. Such distortions do not serve the best interests of either the Everglades or the 40,000 people who make their living from farming. Farm runoff must be taken seriously, but it is not even in the same league as the environmental contamination caused by airports, dry cleaners, automobiles and human sewage. Another hard truth.

Since the historic announcement of this compromise, we farmers have faced a classic Catch-22: If we praise the settlement, some say that it must not be hurting us badly enough. If we reject it, then we are labeled eco-murderers who deserve to be wiped out.

There is another hard truth that Floridians, and in fact all Americans, must face if we are to resolve environmental problems. It is that a valid environmental movement cannot have as its goal the destruction of the nation's economic base. Industry, including agriculture, is essential to supporting a modern quality of life for 250 million Americans. We are afraid that the real goal of some extremists may be to eliminate agriculture from South Florida, and that they are using the Everglades issue as a tool to achieve that end.

Perhaps there are a few people who genuinely want to go back to eating nuts and berries while huddling in a cave in the dark. But only a few.

Most of us want to drive our own cars, eat safe, wholesome foods, live in climate-controlled homes that are attractively landscaped and have access to the very best in medical and entertainment technology.

To live our chosen lifestyles, we must preserve jobs and the economic base while we protect the environment. The negotiated compromise announced by Babbitt does just that. No culture can endure if it sacrifices either the environment or agriculture. We must have both to survive.

Floridians have a choice.

We can go back to the heated debates and continued litigation. If we must fight it out in the courts, no one party - and certainly not the Everglades - will emerge the winner.

Or we can face up to the hard truths, support a compromise that makes the Everglades the winner and preserves farm jobs, and together begin what Secretary Babbitt described as the ''largest, most ambitious ecosystem restoration ever undertaken in this country.''